1. The difference between HTTP and HTTPS:

1. HTTP: HyperText Transfer Protocol:

All communications sent over regular HTTP connections are in ‘plain text’ and can be read by any hacker that manages to break into the connection between your browser and the website. This presents a clear danger if the ‘communication’ is on an order form and includes your credit card details or social security number.

2. HTTPS: HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure:

With a HTTPS connection, all communications are securely encrypted. This means that even if somebody managed to break into the connection, they would not be able decrypt any of the data which passes between you and the website.

3. How the HTTPS keeps safety:

HTTPS pages typically use one of two secure protocols to encrypt communications – SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security). Both the TLS and SSL protocols use what is known as an ‘asymmetric‘ Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) system.

An asymmetric system uses two ‘keys’ to encrypt communications, a ‘public’ key and a ‘private’ key. Anything encrypted with the public key can only be decrypted by the private key and vice-versa. The ‘private‘ key should be kept strictly protected and should only be accessible the owner of the private key. In the case of a website, the private key remains securely ensconced on the web server. Conversely, the public key is intended to be distributed to anybody and everybody that needs to be able to decrypt information that was encrypted with the private key.

HTTPS certificate: When you request a HTTPS connection to a webpage, the website will initially send its SSL certificate to your browser. This certificate contains the public key needed to begin the secure session. Based on this initial exchange, your browser and the website then initiate the ‘SSL handshake’. The SSL handshake involves the generation of shared secrets to establish a uniquely secure connection between yourself and the website. When a trusted SSL Digital Certificate is used during a HTTPS connection, users will see a padlock icon in the browser address bar. When an Extended Validation Certificate is installed on a web site, the address bar will turn green.

2. Introduction to Domain

1. Primary domain

The primary domain is the main address for your site. To see which domain is your primary, open theDomains panel and look for the Primary label next to a domain. All custom domains redirect to theprimary, meaning visitors will always see thatdomain in the browser address bar no matter whichdomain they used.

2. Addon domain

An addon domain is a fully functional domain that can be created from within your control panel. Think of it as having multiple hosting packages all sharing the same control panel. You can create email addresses, forwarders and more — the same way you do for your primary domain on the account.

An Addon Domain is a domain name which points to its own folder within public_html and appears as a separate website from your primary domain.

This allows you to have two separate Web sites on your account. You can have a cars.com and then a candy.com as an add-on domain.

3. Subdomain

Subdomains are based on prefixes added before a given domain name. They are a great way to organize your site or create sub-websites that while different, still make sense to include under the same domain.

For example, west.example.com and east.example.com are subdomains of the example.com domain, which in turn is a subdomain of the comtop-level domain (TLD).

A “subdomain” expresses relative dependence, not absolute dependence: for example, wikipedia.org comprises a subdomain of the orgdomain, and en.wikipedia.org comprises a subdomain of the domain wikipedia.org.

4. Parked Domain

A parked domain is NOT a unique website. This is a mechanism where you would want more than one domain name to point to the same website.

You have a main domain domain1.com to which you want to point domain2.com, domain3.com and domain4.com

All you need to do is add domain2.com, domain3.com and domain4.com as parked domains of domain1.com. Anyone accessing any of these sites will be greeted with the contents of domain1.com

5. Difference between “addon domain” and “subdomain”

For the “addon domain” Content and files for a separate website are stored in a unique folder within your public_html folder. Use domains as “add-ons” when you wish to create a completely separate website on your account with its own domain name, apart from the primary domain name.

3. Introdction to Domain Name System (DNS)

1. Introduction

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchicaldecentralized naming system for computers, services, or other resources connected to the Internet or a private network.

An often-used analogy to explain the Domain Name System is that it serves as the phone bookfor the Internet by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses. For example, the domain name www.example.comtranslates to the addresses 93.184.216.119 (IPv4) and 2606:2800:220:6d:26bf:1447:1097:aa7 (IPv6)

Unlike a phone book, DNS can be quickly updated, allowing a service’s location on the network to change without affecting the end users, who continue to use the same host name.

An important and ubiquitous function of DNS is its central role in distributed Internet services such as cloud servicesand content delivery networks.[4] When a user accesses a distributed Internet service using a URL, the domain name of the URL is translated to the IP address of a server that is proximal to the user.

2. Types of records

type of resource record in the Domain Name System(DNS) used to specify that a domain name is an alias for another domain.This can prove convenient when running multiple services(like an FTP server and a webserver; each running on different ports) from a single IP address.

4. Name server

A name server is a computer hardware or software server that implements a network service for providing responses to queries against a directory service. It translates an often humanly meaningful, text-based identifier to a system-internal, often numeric identification or addressing component. This service is performed by the server in response to a service protocol request.

1. 301 Redirect – Unmasked

it is a permanent type of unmasked redirect. It should be used if your website was permanently moved to the new address and you want it to be indexed by search engines (all traffic and existing SEO value will be routed to the destination URL). It is considered to be the most efficient and search engine-friendly method for webpage redirection.

301 redirects are particularly useful under the following circumstances:

You’ve moved your site to a new domain, and you want to make the transition as seamless as possible.

People access your site through several different URLs. If, for example, your home page can be reached in multiple ways – for instance, via http://example.com/home, http://home.example.com, or http://www.example.com – it’s a good idea to pick one of those URLs as your preferred (canonical) destination and use 301 redirects to send traffic from the other URLs to your preferred URL.

You’re merging two websites and want to make sure that links to outdated URLs are redirected to the correct pages.

Please note that when moving a page from one URL to another, the search engines will take some time to discover the 301, recognize it and credit the new page with the rankings and trust of its predecessor. This process can be lengthier if search engine spiders rarely visit the given web page, or if the new URL doesn’t properly resolve.

2. 302 Redirect – Unmasked

302 redirect is a temporary type of unmasked redirect. It should be used if a certain URL has been changed to a different address temporarily. Search engines will index the original URL and not the destination URL and display the original URL in search results.

So let’s say you want to redirect URL A to URL B via 302 redirect. When you may need it?

– When there is Page A maintenance, you want to temporarily redirect visitors to a temporary Page B.

– When it is important for you to keep URL A indexed but redirect users to some other page.

For example, you sell cell phones and have page labeled “Latest phone model”, which is SEO-friendly. Instead of updating it all the time when a new phone comes out, you can just create a separate page with the new phone and 302 redirect from “Latest phone model” to it. In this case, search engines will keep indexing the “Latest phone model” page while visitors will always be redirected to the page with the latest phone.

You are promoting links to URL A while content for some reason is currently located at URL B.

3. 302 Redirect – Unmasked

302 redirect is a temporary type of unmasked redirect. It should be used if a certain URL has been changed to a different address temporarily. Search engines will index the original URL and not the destination URL and display the original URL in search results.

So let’s say you want to redirect URL A to URL B via 302 redirect. When you may need it?

When there is Page A maintenance, you want to temporarily redirect visitors to a temporary Page B.

When it is important for you to keep URL A indexed but redirect users to some other page.

For example, you sell cell phones and have page labeled “Latest phone model”, which is SEO-friendly. Instead of updating it all the time when a new phone comes out, you can just create a separate page with the new phone and 302 redirect from “Latest phone model” to it. In this case, search engines will keep indexing the “Latest phone model” page while visitors will always be redirected to the page with the latest phone.

You are promoting links to URL A while content for some reason is currently located at URL B.

4. URL Frame – Masked

URL Frame (also known as URL masking or URL cloaking) is similar to URL Redirect except that instead of redirecting the client to your web page, the web page is displayed in a frame from the server. With this method, the visitor’s browser will display your domain name (for example, www.mydomain.com) and some other person’s website.

Sounds cool, right, but are there any cons?

– URL Frame is bad for SEO.

The problem with domain masking is that it creates duplicate content in search engines. Google and other search engines will identify your domains and masked ones as duplicates and decide to serve one over the other; and sometimes, it’s not always the one you want. In short, it is not possible to have a search engine presence for two domains showing the same content.

– Not all websites allow masking itself.

It is possible to prevent URL masking at the hosting server level, so if your domain is giving Forbidden or other similar errors, then most likely, such measures are enabled at the target server side.

5. CNAME Record

CNAME record is actually not a redirect type record but often mistakenly used as such. The main difference between CNAME and other redirects is that CNAME is just a DNS record type (similar to A, TXT and other DNS level records) while 301, 302 redirects and URL frames are hosting server-powered redirects. In other words, CNAME is not redirecting anything but only provides the same IP addresses and other DNS records from the domain you create CNAME to.

For example:

You have domainA.com pointed to your hosting server via an A record to some IP: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX. You have domainB.com for which you have created a CNAME record to domainA.com:

domainB.com CNAME domainA.com

As a result, both domainA.com and domainB.com will be resolving from the same XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX IP address since domainB.com will be using an IP address set from domainA.com because of the CNAME record. Therefore, the CNAME record is not creating an actual redirect or content but only copying DNS records from the target domain.

You may think that since DNS records are the same, both domains will then resolve to the same website, but it is a common misconception. A CNAME record directs web traffic for a particular domain to the target domain’s IP address. Once the visitor reaches that IP address, the local Apache (or other web server) configuration will determine how the domain is handled. If the domain in question is not configured on the server, the server will simply display its default web page (if any).

This may or may not be the web page for the target domain in the CNAME record, depending on how the server is configured.

Even if a server is configured to serve a CNAME record correctly, some advanced websites based on such CMS as WordPress, Joomla and others may resolve incorrectly if you point a domain to them via CNAME. As they are highly dependable on the domain these websites were developed for, by default, they are not suited to work under 2 or more different domains.

NOTE: It is not recommended to set up a CNAME record for a naked domain (@ or domain.com) as it will make other records for your domain (such as MX or TXT records) invisible. As a result, the mail service will stop working, and the emails will not get delivered properly. It is possible to create a CNAME record for www.domain.com and then set up a redirect from domain.com to www.domain.com as a workaround.